Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

There was a dance, I remember, when I was about sixteen — to raise money for a special comforts-fund that the Mine had inaugurated for ex-employees now in the forces. My mother said, blushing with pleasure, the almost tearful moisture that came to her eyes when she was proud: “Daddy, this’ll mean a long dress for your daughter. …”

My mother was completely absorbed in the making of that dress; we were up together late every night before the dance, while she sewed and fitted, and I stood on the table with my head near the heat of the light in its beaded shade, turning slowly to show how the hem fell. Then before we went to bed we sat on the kitchen table, drinking tea and talking. I had taken over the care of my mother’s fine wiry hair, red, like my own: “You can have it set at the hairdresser’s on the Thursday before — then it’ll be nice and soft for me to do up for you on Saturday.” My mother thought a moment. “But on Thursday afternoon I’ve promised to bake four-dozen sausage rolls. I don’t want to get all steamy in the kitchen after it’s been done.” “Tie it up! Why can’t you tie it up!” I stacked the cups in the sink for Anna in the morning.

Up and down the passage, in the bathroom, snatches of our talk continued until the lights went out.

We dressed for the dance together. My mother had surprised me with a real florist’s corsage — they called it a “spray”—pink carnations and pale blue delphinium, and it was pinned to the shoulder of my dress with its silver paper holder just showing. Every time I turned my head I could feel it brush my neck.

I danced with Raymond Dufalette in a blue suit with his hair so oiled that it looked as if he had just come out of the sea, dripping wet. He went to boarding school and had learned to dance the previous term; he brought me thankfully back to where my mother and father sat, ready with kindly questions about how he liked school and what he was going to do when he was finished. Then I sat, my back very stiff, looking straight before me. I was afraid I was perspiring the little organdy balloon that encased the lop of each arm. I was still more afraid that my father might ask me to dance to save me.

I remember that just as I was getting desperate, a fair boy astonishingly came right across the splintered boards to ask me to dance, and the dance was a Paul Jones, so that I found myself with a succession of partners, snatched away when the music broke into a march and I walked sheepishly round with the other girls — there was Olwen, but Olwen had come with a partner, and he kept her, swaying at the side — then replaced by the young man or somebody’s father who found himself opposite me when the march ended. The evening passed in the stiff hands of thin fair boys whose necks were too free of stiff collars. Their knees bumped me, hard as table legs. Their black evening suits and the crackle of shirt front encased nothingness, like the thin glossy shells, the fine glass wings of beetles which crunch to a puff of dead leaf-powder if you crush them. When the ice cream was served I ran hand in hand with my mother; we had promised to help. Over in the corner at the bar, the two Cluff boys in uniform leaned with one or two other soldiers home for the week end. They drank beer, and laughter spurted up in their talk, backs to the dancers. “Ice cream?” I held out the tray of saucers, smiling with impartial polite reserve, not knowing whether or not I should recognize them as Alan and Francis Cluff.

“Here boys, ice cream, why not—” Alan began passing the saucers over my head. Francis said in an aside, his eyes lowered for a moment as if to screen him, “Hello, Helen.” The smell of war, of young men taken in war, a disturbing mixture and contradiction of the schoolboy smell of soap in khaki, and the smooth scent of shaven skin, the warmth of body that brought out the smell of khaki as the warmth of the iron brings up the odor of a fabric, came from them.

I danced again and again that year at parties with the fair young boys in their formal dress clothes who, like myself, were in their last year at school. Once or twice in the winter holidays, one of them took me to the cinema on a Saturday night; but I was only sixteen, I was busy studying for my matriculation, there was plenty of time. “Time enough when you’re working and independent, and school’s behind you,” said my mother. — Olwen had left school a year ago; she attended what was called a business college, upstairs in a building in the town; the chakker-chakker of typewriters sailed out of the wide-open windows and at lunchtime the girls came down to stroll about the town, not in gym frocks, but their own choice of dresses.

What was the stiffness that congealed in me and in the bodies of the young boys with the spiky-smooth hair beside me in the sinking dark of the cinema; made me sit up straight, my arms arranged along the rests helplessly when the lights went up and the music rose and the colored advertisements flipped one by one on and off the screen, and I waited? Back came the young boy with two little cardboard buckets of ice cream, edging bent, apologetic, along the row. We sat and ate with wooden spoons; the boy kept asking questions: Shall I put that down for you? Can you manage? Is it melted? Did it get on your dress? It seemed that I did nothing but smile, shake my head, assure, no. We spoke of films we had seen, veered back to school, fell back on anecdotes that began: “Well I know, I have an Uncle who told us once …”or “—Like my little brother; the other day he was …” Sudden bursts of sympathy ignited, like matches struck by mistake, between us; were batted out with the astonishment that instinctively deals with such fires. He had not read the books I had read; I knew that. He talked a great deal about the different models of motorcars. My jaws felt tight and I wanted to yawn.

We sat seriously through the film. Sometimes the young boy’s foot would touch mine by mistake — they had such big feet in shoes with thick rubber soles — and there was a ruffle of apologies. The one — the nicer one, actually — had a crenelation of incipient pimples perpetually lying in anger beneath the tender shaven skin along his jaw, to which, in the imagined privacy of the dark, I always saw, out of the corner of my eye, his fingers return feeling along as if reading the bumps in the tender, disgusting language of adolescence; curt, monosyllabic as obscenity, and as searching.

At this time, too, my father was teaching me to play golf. When the hooter went at half-past four I left my books open on the dining-room table and went into my room to put on rubber-soled shoes. My father came home with the air of expectancy of someone who is waiting to go out again immediately, and we were at the first tee just as the sun shifted its day-long gaze and glanced obliquely off the grass. Afterward I sat on the veranda full of Mine officials at the clubhouse, drinking my orange squash at a rickety wicker table, with my father sipping his beer. Our heads were continually turned to talk to people; often two or three men screeched chairs over the cement to sit with us, others would swing a leg against the table while they paused to talk in passing. Even if their talk veered to channels that slowly excluded me, leaving me at some point gently washed upon the limit of my comprehension or interest, I rested there comfortably, hearing their voices rather than what they said, lulled by the warm throbbing coming up in my scarlet, blistered palms. I lolled my head back, put my dusty feet up on the bar of the table; the sky, swept clear of the day, held only radiance, far up above the shade that rose like water steeping the trees and the drop of the grass. Over at the water hole, the whole world was repeated, upside down. It all seemed simple, as if a puzzle had dissolved in my hands. The half-questions would never be asked, dark fins of feeling that could not be verified in the face of my father, my mother, the Mine officials, would not show through the surface that every minute of every day polished. I rested, my foot dancing a little tune; the way the unborn rest between one stage of labor and the next, thinking, perhaps, that they have arrived.